The Fiio X5 Thread
Jul 18, 2015 at 11:14 AM Post #18,061 of 19,652
Yes. What are you trying to accomplish? If you're happy with the sound, maybe stick with what you have. If not, in what way are you unsatisfied?
 
Jul 18, 2015 at 1:49 PM Post #18,063 of 19,652
Sflo2 is a brilliant player, especially from its line out. I would stick with the Sflo2 / E12 combo. Probably balances out well actually, adding some warmth in the chain with E12. Unless you can demo X5 I say stick with your proven combo.
 
Jul 18, 2015 at 1:57 PM Post #18,064 of 19,652
I should add, I meant Sflo2 is a brilliant 'sounding' player. The UI however may make you want to violently break things. Including the Sflo2.
 
Jul 18, 2015 at 2:48 PM Post #18,066 of 19,652
My issue with sflo2 and ie8 is that i should lower in user eq 300hz to -8 in order not to be pumped with midbass and "lose" the other freq.
My other issue with sflo2 is indeed the ui .
Battery is not a problem i can use external usb powerbank.
 
Jul 19, 2015 at 5:23 AM Post #18,067 of 19,652
Just joined the club, i'm a new X5ii owner!

I'm more of a home stereo guy, but thought of technologies in portable nowadays could be good enough to have it as a source of my home hifi system. 
True enough, I'm happy with the results of both the lineout to my home hifi and the headphone out to my Grado 325i and Sennheiser HD650.

Noticed that there is a OTG function. Did anybody tried to hoot it up an OTG with 2TB HDD with that ? That will be awesome !


Not enough power to spin around an old school hard drive, and its very picky about which thumb drives / SSDs it will work with. Read the OTG thread for more info. OTG support is pretty half hearted it has to be said. Many of us users saw ORG support as a route to a big capacity DAP, but Fiio don't appear to see it as anything more than an occasional facility.
 
Jul 21, 2015 at 11:04 AM Post #18,068 of 19,652
The stuttering occurs and is widely reported on this and other forums. I have about 80GB of Mp3 files transferred to each of 2 128 GB cards. I encoded all of the Mp3 files myself using the highest quality setting with DBPoweramp. This makes high quality Mp3 files but these files do not compare in size to Flac files except that they are smaller; of course. I use Mp3 files because I want access to all of my music in one place and they will not fit on my 160 GB iPod. Now, I know the iPod is inferior in sound quality to the Fiio X5 but AT LEAST it plays All of my music without stuttering. My Fiio  on the other hand, always stutters during playback. It stutters randomly about every 8-15 minutes while it plays randomly through my collection. My iPod never does. This makes it very frustrating to use the Fiio which I purchased based on great reviews, a very good price for the quality, and the fact that I can put 2 128 GB cards on it to fit all of my music. I used the fastest high end cards. I have formatted and reloaded these cards twice now with the same result;..stuttering playback. Scientific method....My iPod plays these files perfect with no problems; the Fiio X5 with the fastest, high end cards and the latest firmware does not. The problem is the Fiio X5 software. I am thinking that the Fiio has some troubles parsing the folders and stutters because of that issue. I did drag and drop all of my folders to the cards as a group and waited 4-6 hours for them to populate the cards. My ripping software puts albums in individual folders for keeping each album in a separate folder and these albums are in their own folders arranged by artist name. The files also contain a jpeg of the album artwork created by the ripping program. This is the same method I use to load the iPod but it is possible that the Fiio X5 does not handle these files in the same manner as the iPod. That might be the problem. That might be why playback always stutters. But the Fiio should not stutter, ever.
 
Jul 21, 2015 at 11:20 AM Post #18,069 of 19,652
I hesitate to say anything, in case my situation might change… But I have no problems with stuttering or the use of OTG. I format my cards with in the X5, and simply drag files over from my Mac mini and used a program to clean up the hidden files. I populated another card off at a friends PC in Germany, and also have no problem with that mini SD card. I am wondering, what is the variable that causes some people to have these problems and others not? Is it variability in production? Are people handling and formatting their memory differently? I have not updated the firmware in about a year, though I doubt the firmware has gotten worse regarding these issues. Does anybody have insight into the factors that are really causing this, and the apparent variability?
 
Jul 21, 2015 at 12:21 PM Post #18,070 of 19,652
I remember back when the X3 (original) first came out, i had stutter with some files. This got fixed by software update.

I don't have the stutter on the X5 at all, but i hope FiiO can figure out what causes it for you, and fixes it.
 
Jul 21, 2015 at 4:11 PM Post #18,072 of 19,652
No stuttering on mine. Depends on how you format the card (protip - use the X5 settings menu to format) or what album art size is embedded.

What some people fail to realize is that the Apple ecosystem is more controlled and therefore harder to break. iTunes does all the heavy lifting as far as files and file formats go and the hardware has no choice but to be formatted to the proper specification that is tested to work with the software. The reason for the smoother user experience is simply because they have their players tied to iTunes and have a controlled environment with software that can take advantage of that.
 
Jul 21, 2015 at 4:32 PM Post #18,074 of 19,652
I've formatted the card with Disk Utility to FAT32 and with the X5's built in formatting tool with no problems.

I used to have problems with large artwork but downscaled it to 500 pixels on the largest side to avoid issues.


Of course other software can format the cards, but the no-brainer way is to use the player. Some format tools use a default allocation unit size that is incompatible with the FiiO DAPs. It's a trade off between read speed and slightly larger storage space. I'd just format with the unit and be done with it if I was having issues, which I'm not. :wink_face:

+1 on the artwork. No need to have it large on the player as it only slows it down.
 

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